ould you listen to it if you did not know who composed
it?--is met. The overture is entertaining, if not very original. Truly
a wonder child.

Hugo Wolf was a song writer who perilously grazed genius, but he
rotted before he was ripe. Need we consider the respective positions
of Bruckner or Mahler, one all prodigality and diffuseness, the other
largely cerebral? And Mahler without Bruckner would hardly have been
possible. Those huge tonal edifices, skyscrapers in bulk, soon prove
barren to the spirit. A mountain in parturition with a mouse! Nor need
we dwell upon the ecstatic Scriabine who mimicked Chopin so deftly in
his piano pieces, "going" Liszt and Strauss one better--or ten, if you
will--and spilt his soul in swooning, roseate vibrations. Withal, a
man of ability and vast ambitions. (He died in 1915.)

More than two years ago I heard in Vienna Schoenberg's Gurrelieder, a
setting to a dramatic legend by Jens Peter Jacobsen. This choral and
orchestral work was composed in 1902, but it sounds newer than the
quartets or the sextet. In magnitude it beats Berlioz. It demands five
solo singers, a dramatic reader, three choral bodies, and an orchestra
of one hundred and forty, in which figure eight flutes, seven
clarinets, six horns, four Wagner tubas. Little wonder the impression
was a stupendous one. There were episodes of great beauty, dramatic
moments, and appalling climaxes. As Schoenberg has decided both in his
teaching and practice that there are no unrelated harmonies, cacophony
was not absent. Another thing: this composer has temperament. He is
cerebral, as few before him, yet in this work the bigness of the
design did not detract from the emotional quality. I confess I did not
understand at one hearing the curious dislocated harmonies and
splintered themes--melodies they are not--in the Pierrot Lunaire. I
have been informed that the ear should play a secondary role in this
"new" music; no longer through the porches of the ear must filter
plangent tones, wooing the tympanum with ravishing accords. It is now
the "inner ear," which is symbolic of a higher type of musical art. A
complete disassociation of ideas, harmonies, rhythmic life,
architectonic is demanded. To quote an admirer of the Vienna
revolutionist: "The entire man in you must be made over before you
can divine Schoenberg's art." Perhaps his aesthetik embraces what the
metaphysicians call the Langley-James hypothesis; fear, anxiety, pain
are the "cont